I was working on a much longer and more in-depth piece, but I didn’t have time to finish it and won’t bother. I do have some thoughts on Trump’s second term. These are, for the most part, not really given from a libertarian or anarchist perspective. They are just taking a hard, cold look at the situation and asking some questions. I don’t expect this to change anybody’s mind, but hopefully it gets people to think and maybe sets some expectations.

Trump stars in the new prime-time dramedy: “My First Real CEO Role!”

Trump admitted on Rogan’s podcast that he hadn’t given any thought to his executive team prior to his first election. Trump is very unusual as a successful CEO in that he’s never had to build and manage a high-powered C-Suite. This is the first time Trump will have to be a real CEO with high-power people deliberately pulled into his administration (as opposed to the wall-spaghetti team of swamp creatures in his first term), and it’s a problem. Trump is infamous for his ego, stealing credit, and firing people over personality conflicts. The issue is that it’s normally the CEO’s role to keep the team running smoothly and ironing these matters out. Having the person who’s the biggest source of trouble in these areas being in charge of solving them is a train wreck waiting to happen. Consider how many top people on Trump’s team made it through his first term: zero, and these were political denizens whose careers were already based on expertly rimming their bosses and swallowing whatever comes out with literal shit-eating grins on their faces. One possible solution is to find a Chief of Staff who has a relationship with Trump that allows them to tell him to shut up and back down. That’s a very tall order. It would probably have to be a family member, maybe Jared Kushner. Or it may be impossible. But if this problem can’t be solved, then every member of Trump’s “Dream Team” will likely either be fired or ragequit within a year. Personally, I think Ramaswamay will be the first to leave because his ego and Trump’s are probably not even going to share a city well in a working capacity, let alone being down the hall from each other.

Trump’s “Dream Team”: Resumes? What resumes?

And then we get to the “Dream Team” itself. It may look impressive, but only if you’ve never seen a great executive team before. Kennedy has no real leadership experience. Gabbard was vice chair of the DNC for around three years before she stepped down to endorse Bernie Sanders. Ramaswamay is another sales / finance CEO, not an operations guy. He made a lot of money selling stock in his companies, but never put out any great products. So, basically, these people are all talkers, not doers. JD Vance is stuck in the VP slot, which is comprised of attending political events that the President is too busy for. And for everybody jumping up and screaming Ron Paul, look: I love Ron Paul. He’s the last politician I voted for, in the 2012 GOP primary (even held my nose and changed my registration for a day). But he’s 90 years old. He’s as spry and vibrant as a person can be at 90, but he’s still freaking 90. He’s maybe good for a phone call or two each week. He won’t exactly be coming into the office much.

The only person on the team who’s not complete deadweight after the election is Elon Musk. Musk is a vision / detail CEO who has a solid track record of putting together great executive teams of his own. That’s the good part. The bad part is that he’s already CEO of two major corporations, Tesla and SpaceX, which means he has a fiduciary / legal duty to be a CEO to both of them. Two-timing like this is already deeply frowned upon from a corporate governance standpoint, but Musk is one of the very rare few who can get away with it. On top of this, Musk is also CTO and board chair at SpaceX. To say this is really stretching things is an understatement. Adding a major administration role is legitimately begging for shareholder lawsuits, and they wouldn’t even be unreasonable. I still think he can get away with something here, but anything more than an arms-length advisory capacity after a few months would mean he’ll have to give up control of at least one of his companies in the meantime, probably both. Legally, he might even be pushed to divest if he gets too deep. Will he be willing to do this? How much of Trump’s ego and credit-stealing will he be able to swallow along the way, and for how long? These are hard questions that I don’t even see anybody even wondering about.

And then we get to the latest member, who is practically Satan himself: Mike Pompeo, raging neocon warhawk and former CIA director, and voted to be the one most likely to have talked Trump into assassinating Qasem Soleimani guaranteeing at least another generation of Middle Eastern strife and profits for the military-industrial complex. I have a sneaking suspicion that somebody sat Trump down and told him to bring this guy in or the next shot won’t miss. It’s kind of darkly ironic to watch that happen right after Trump piled on a bunch of libertarian endorsements. At least we now know which libertarians are unreliable and easily duped.

Oh, and speaking of that, I suppose there’s still the Libertarian to be Named Later. Maybe they’ll appoint Dave Smith as Secretary of Janitorial Supplies or something. Dare to dream.

Trump’s Dream Team: The Dark, Sordid Past

What do Robert Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, and Elon Musk all have in common? They were very liberal Democrats for their whole political lives right up until about five minutes ago. Vivek Ramaswamay is random. Mike Pompeo, as mentioned, was Satan and still is Satan. JD Vance is busy being places. There’s no ideological anchor here, and even when people change teams overnight their instincts don’t move as quickly. So while most of these people are good in a few places (except for Pompeo, unless you need to open a dimensional portal to Hell), anywhere outside of these areas you mostly have a bunch of left-wing Democrats or worse. Ramaswamay’s deepest and most closely-held ideological devotion is always to the last idea he heard that sounded really super cool, but that’s better than the rest.

Trump’s Dream Team: The Missing Link

There is one area area of glaring weakness in all of Trump’s team, and sadly it’s the most important one: economic theory. Ramaswamay at least mostly leans libertarian here, depending on whoever he most recently did coke with. Again, the rest are all leftists (oh, and Satan). Trump’s favorite word is “tariffs,” and while one can argue that consumption taxes are better than income taxes (the trick is not winding up with more of both), that’s not why Trump loves them. He loves tariffs because he can go to economic war with Chyiiina. I’ve already written about why this is dangerously retarded, and will address it some more below. Trump has shown no indication, whatsoever, that he understands the link between government spending and inflation. His big idea so far is cutting interest rates, which he doesn’t have the power to do and even if he could it just throws more gas on the fire. If he can cut government that does help, but his supporters virtually all believe that prices will come back down and they’re never coming back down. That’s not how monetary inflation works. The increase is permanent (barring some scenarios so unlikely they’re not even worth discussing), and the best you can do is slow the increase and hopefully let wages catch up. If Team Trump actually can cut spending, by a crazy amount, then they’ll accomplish some of this accidentally and that’s good enough. But that’s the challenge as it is now. New challenges will almost certainly arise, and Trump is very, very weak here right now and will get even weaker as his Dream Team abandons him.

Donald Trump, Backed into a Corner

Trump did pretty well in his first term, for almost three years. After that, either by accident or by design, the deep state got him twice and I see no indication whatsoever that he or anybody on his team has clued into how or why. In late 2019, Trump was threatened with an impeachment trial. Pushing him into a corner like this made him want to puff himself up and show everyone what a big and powerful man he is. This is when Pompeo (and maybe Pence) tricked him into proving what a big man he is by assassinating Soleimani, ending any hope of peace with Iran and thereby the rest of the region. Hook, line, sinker. Then, to cap it off, there was COVID. Fauci and friends came in and hyped up the threat they created, while promising to Trump that he could take yuge, bold, decisive action and literally save the world. Hook, line, sinker. They can’t impeach the Great and Powerful Trump if he literally saves the world, with yuge, bold, decisive action, can they? We all know how this turned out, and to this day Trump is still convinced that he literally saved the world. He can’t admit, even to himself, that he got played the fool. Twice. And this brings us to the biggest concern of all:

The Deep State Has Trump Figured Out

If they get him isolated, under pressure, then create a crisis, he’ll puff up and they can practically lead Trump along like a well-trained dog on a leash. I don’t think they’ll hit him with another pandemic. There are plenty of other crisis on the stove already. Trump is already itching to create a new one: a trade war with China.

Look at it from another angle: in a hypothetical nuclear war, China has 400 nuclear weapons and the US has about 5800. Both countries would suffer horribly, but the US would “win,” for whatever that means. In an economic war, those numbers are far worse than reversed. China holds all the cards, and could easily send the US back to the stone age without even firing one bullet. They put up with the US because we make a lot of money for them and they have a huge investment in US debt and US dollars. All they have to do is stop exports and dump their US currency holdings (about 15% of all dollars in existence) and debt. That’s just money, and China can afford to eat the loss. Sure, their citizens will suffer, but it’s not like their government has been unwilling to starve a few tens of millions for the greater good / leap forward in the past. And if you think the deep state has any more concern for the citizens of the US, I’ve got some ocean-front real estate in Kansas to sell you. Trump gets the boot, MAGA and the libertarians are completely destroyed from a credibility standpoint, the swamp comes back with a vengeance, China makes nice (for a steep price, of course), and the bad guys all win yugely. Probably even with a central bank digital currency in place of the annihilated dollar. This isn’t even a far-fetched scenario, and Trump would happily prance right into that trap preaching his greatness to the world all along the way.

That’s just something off the top of my head. The possibilities are infinite. One place where we can Trust the Experts™ is the deep state, which has been toppling governments all over the world for generations now. Just think of it as practicing away for the championship game at home, while we’re heading into the match with arguably the worst possible coach and he probably won’t even have much, if any, of a team left.

But, hey, at least we’ll get some mean tweets.